Outraged by superfluous elevator buttons

This is a very important topic, I'm surprised it has not come up yet. I noticed something the other day and i believe it warrants a long discussion and probably some sort of political action.

I have been in many elevators recently, all in buildings with only two floors: a ground floor and a second floor. And these elevators have two buttons, one for each floor. This is wholly unnecessary. There need not be a button for each floor. One button would suffice. The floor-I'm-not-on-button could easily do the job of both existing buttons; if on the ground floor it takes you to the second, and if on the second floor it takes you to the ground. There must be some elevator company conspiracy designed to justify them doing more work and thus charge us more for unnecessary elevator parts.

This is an excellent point. It has been bothering me for a long time. I think before we standardize on the buttons, we need a world government to standardize on floor numbering world-wide. It is totally chaotic and should not be allowed.

First, some buildings in the US do not have a 13th Floor. Can you believe it? It is superstition based on a bad, bad thing - please excuse me mentioning this - the superstition is based on some improper interpretation of religion that should be banned.

Now the Europeans. Can you believe some of them number their floors starting with 0. It is absurd and should similarly be banned. Who in their right mind would say I am on the 0th floor.

Now once we get that taken care of, we need a standard way of numbering basement floors. Going down from the first floor, or God help us, the 0th floor, some number B1, B2, B3, etc. In this case the larger numbers are lower. And using letters - no good - not all countries use the same alphabet.

Once this is all taken care of, we can deal with buttons. One issue is going vertical down one column and then the other versus going across each row.

It is totally chaotic, and we both must have too much time on our hands.

-2: basement, completely underground-1: half underground, half above ground (the building is built over a little hill1: all above ground, but can only access the ground outside from half the floor2-6 etc.

First, some buildings in the US do not have a 13th Floor. Can you believe it? It is superstition based on a bad, bad thing - please excuse me mentioning this - the superstition is based on some improper interpretation of religion that should be banned.

Next time you fly on Continental...go around between row 12 and 14 and see if you notice anything missing

The same thing on Air France, AirTran, KLM, Iberia, JAL, Cathy Pacific, Malaysian Airlines, Singapore Airlines, Air New Zealand, Alitalia and Thai Airways

Lufthansa have no row 13 and 17(seventeen is unlucky in Italy)

ANA has no row 4, 9 and 13 (4 sounds like 'death in Japanese and 9 sounds like torture)

It stupid, I'd love to walk up the aisle to a triscodecaphobic individual in row 14 and point out that they are actually in row 13 even if it says 14.... no matter what they call it...it's still the 13th row on the plane

MusclDrew, are you trying to say that NONE of those airlines has an elevator between rows 12 and 14? How very strange! Do you suppose that all airplane designers are in cahoots? It really wouldn't surprise me.

In the main library here there are buttons which claim to operate front and back doors on the elevators for certain floors. Now, can you imagine pressing the wrong button and walking into a wall?

I think the safest thing to do is to restrict all elevators to single floor use. The seventh floor elevator would then be just that. No confusion.